Users -
need information about what products they can use,
how to make best use of the products they have,
and how to influence industry and policymakers.

Policy Makers -
need to understand the low cost and high benefit of making, purchasing, and encouraging accessible products.

Biography

Greg Lowney is widely recognized as one of the leading experts on accessible software design—the
design of products and technologies that are usable by a wide range of people,
including individuals with disabilities or who are aging.

In 1988, Lowney became the first person at Microsoft to work on accessibility,
and founded Microsoft's Accessibility and Disabilities Group in 1992.
He managed a variety of projects, including drafting corporate policy and
strategy on accessibility, and guided the development of accessibility
features for products such as the MS-DOS, Windows, and Windows NT operating
systems. He was responsible for corporate relations with the disability
community, developed guidelines for accessible software and Web sites for and
addressing accessibility in product documentation, customer service, support,
and internal training.

Bill Gates promoted him to Director in February 1998, and he
also served as Microsoft's Accessibility Architect beginning in February 2000.

Before working full-time on accessibility,
Lowney was Senior Program Manager for the Microsoft Windows 3.0
and 3.1 operating systems. He was responsible for core components such as the
basic user interface, protected mode systems, and networking, as well as
accessibility. He joined Microsoft in December of 1986 and served as test
manager for Windows/386 and development tools, after holding a variety of
programming positions and serving as microcomputer support specialist for a
large school district.

For his work in developing guidelines for accessible software,
Lowney was honored with the Vice President's Hammer Award for Reinventing Government.
For his work in promoting accessibility inside and outside of Microsoft,
he received the Ron Mace Designing for the 21st Century Award.
He is co-inventor on three U.S. patents.
During his work on Windows, the organization of
Microsoft Systems Engineers awarded him honorary membership and the title of
“Vice President of Cool Things.”

Lowney left Microsoft in January 2002 in order to pursue accessibility
goals for the wider disability and developer communities, and founded
Lowney Access Research, LLC, in March 2002.

Among recent and current projects, he was one of the primary authors drafting technical sections
of the international standard ISO 9241-171, “Ergonomics of human-system interaction —
Part 171: Guidance on software accessibility” and the American national standard HFES/ANSI 200.2,
“Human Factors Engineering of Software User Interfaces — Part 2: Accessibility”,
a technical contributor to guidelines being developed by the
World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative, and a primary author of the
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0 describing how to improve accessibility of
web browsers and other client software.